The return of the gatefold sleeve, or a new kind of romance

“To us, rock music isn’t specifically about music. You can get the same effect from other things”
British Sea Power (The Guardian Guide, 2008)

“The dreams and ambitions of everyday life, the small hopes and failures, were attempts to bring these separated elements into a single whole again”
(JG Ballard from Myths of the Near Future, 1982)

When British Sea Power played their idiosyncratic brand of indie rock at a Centenary Party for John Betjeman it wasn’t for the publicity. They’re aren’t many brownie points to be had in the rock world from allying yourself to a dead, if famous, poet. What the band’s performance in a marquee in Cornwall in 2006 alongside school children, novelists and poets represented was evidence of a different sensibility at work among today’s young musicians.

The signs have been there for a some time - mainly to be spotted on their album sleeves, the return of gatefold sleeves. If these elaborate cardboard constructs reflected the decadence of the times back in the days of vinyl (which self-respecting, successful artist of the 1970s didn’t release at least one album in this expensive format?) what does their return, albeit in a smaller CD version really mean? Why switch from plastic jewel cases to cardboard fold-out sleeves? Why ditch a nice picture of the band for a weird painting, faux book cover, fake passport, personal bric a brac, visual pun? Why dress in strange clothes, British Rail uniforms, Napoleon‘s hat? Why aren’t these mainly but not exclusively British ‘indie’ bands; Guillemots, The Mystery Jets, Radiohead, Arcade Fire, British Sea Power, The Klaxons et al, trying to look cool and moody or young and sexy?

While the original kings of the gatefold sleeve, the bloated, egotistical bands of 1970s progressive rock, were fixated on the planets and the gods (or making themselves look godlike), today’s bands usually use the freedom of the gatefold to put forward less fantastical, more worldly ideas - though often of a personal nature. For some it’s simply the desire to show straight away that the music contained within their CD amounts to more than a collection of throwaway pop songs.
Such is atmospheric Icelandic soundscape band Sigur Ros’s desire to be viewed as ‘art’ that their album sleeves are just that - ‘art’. No lyrics, no recording details, just a wood-cut style artwork of a figure in the woods, such as on 2005’ Takk.

When they’re not dressing up in old British Rail workers’ uniforms on stage, Leeds’ gloomy post-rock outfit iLIKETRAINS like to pick up the paintbrushes themselves. 2007’s Elegies to Lessons Learnt album comes housed in a slide out cardboard sleeve consisting of an impressive gothic painting of a dark, foreboding tree whose winter branches reach out in as sinister a fashion as the music it contains. The sleeve tells us it’s called the following: “Tree of Eyam - Oil on canvas, 18” x 24” by iLIKETRAINS”.

It's not the sort of behaviour normally associated with pop or rock groups, then Sigur Ros and iLIKETRAINS don’t make music make like most pop or rock groups. The bigger surprise is that many bands who currently operate in the mainstream pop and rock world, and who are currently enjoying pop success, have adopted a similar approach to the act of creativity. All of a sudden, fans are being presented with collages of images, clashes of pictorial ideas, a crossword puzzle of visual motifs to decipher.

The front and back of 2007’s Mercury Prize-winning album Myths of a Near Future by The Klaxons, who took to wearing pseudo-Viking outfits on their last UK tour, boasts a colourful patchwork of pictures which seems to have been physically torn from sci-fi and art magazines. Lost worlds, early space satellites, a scrabble board with the letter ‘The Klaxons’ spelt out and eyes - lots and lots of eyes. Designed by this young ‘indie’ band’s two main musicians, Jamie Reynolds and Simon Taylor, the sleeve says almost literally we have a different way of seeing things. The cardboard, open out cover of Guillemots’ From The Cliffs, a mini-album of early tracks released in 2006, looks like an art project put together by the band - and it was, with the help of Meirion Pritchard and Darren Bowles. On the front, a child’s hand can just be seen reaching out for a plastic dinosaur with which to attack a toy castle in a sand pit. The back has the group surrounded by little children; lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield sitting in a Napoleon's hat holding a kettle in front of directional arrows on a large road sign. It’s no ordinary road sign for what kind of road sign would ask questions like “Who will I be?” This itself is a sign that the sleeve isn’t merely a point of style. A self-conscious mix of reality and fantasy; (the band had to get permission from their own parents to use one of the photographs), this conceptual tableaux doesn't mean Guillemots are trying to retreat from the adulthood into a fantasy childhood. By placing themselves inside this visual conundrum, the band are not only personalising the ideas it contains, they are also showing that they, too, are part of the madness. Literally in a playpen of their own making, the group is hoping to make sense of the non-nonsensical, sifting through past and present, attempting to bring both together in a search for an answer.

Rather than a playpen, it's a den The Mystery Jets have built on the cover of their 2006 album Making Dens. Its elaborate gatefold sleeve looks like it took an entire art division to create and it did, albeit in close participation with lead vocalist/guitarist Blaine Harrison and the rest of the group. There the band sit on the front cover, safe and warm, surrounded by the bric a brac of someone’s life. Above the den is the darkness of nightfall but inside the bright light of giant candles shine revealing the following - a model plane, an anatomical dummy, a blow-up doll, a lifebuoy. When you open up the gatefold on Making Dens, it’s possible to judge the real scale of what this poppy but ambitious outfit are trying to achieve. As well as hard to read song lyrics presented in the style of a typewritten essay, its eight-page insert is packed with dense collages - images of the chaotic nature of modern civilisation interspersed with drawings, a painting of the great pyramids, mementoes of childhood, newspaper cuttings and a handwritten manifesto. Presented as a handmade ‘Eel Pie Island’ passport, a tiny borough in the middle of the River Thames at Twickenham, the sleeve is part artistic collage and part personal scrapbook.

It makes the gatefold sleeve of Funeral, by larger than life 15-piece Canadian band Arcade Fire look almost cautious in comparison. Their 2004 album’s insert is presented in the form of a facsimile of a service order at a family funeral. Designed by Tracy Maurice and Hilary Treadwell, it’s a striking, if sobering, context to place that band‘s epic music. If The Mystery Jets’ ‘passport’ has anything to declare it’s the importance of “escaping reality” but also “creating the band’s own mark on the world”. Two very different concepts, a contradiction replicated in the design of the sleeve. It’s an approach not without antecedents and if you want a simple way of arriving where we are now, just put together two albums from ten years ago. First, the real world of Radiohead’s Ok Computer (1997) - car jams, car crashes, modernity turned to chaos. Second, the fantasy world of The Beta Band’s The Three E.P.s (1998) - trains juxtaposed with deserts, drawings with photographs, seriously impressive landscapes blended with shots of the band dressed up in silly costumes. One sums up a negative view of reality, the other attempts to rise above it by imposing their imaginations on the outside world.

A similar clash of worlds is the main theme of the sleeves of Through The Windowpane. Guillemot’s first album proper (2006), designed by the band and Arnaud Nichols, is presented in a standard plastic jewel case but it’s anything but a standard sleeve. Inside, an unreal-looking brick wall has the mysterious phrase “words can’t express what it means” scrawled in large, neat handwriting. The front cover sees a blue and green rural landscape inserted within a grey, decaying window frame. It’s reminiscent of album sleeve from a different era and a different sort of band which also pits the beauty of nature against the drabness of a man-made construct in an image presented as a whole. It's 1971, the cover of Led Zeppelin IV. The young rock giants, or the design team Hipgnosis, rather, pick a photograph of a shabby old country tramp carrying a bundle of sticks, then place it into a photograph of a crumbling urban house. What's at work here is clearly more than a case of design for design’s sake or an artistic desire to be seen as artistic. In this era of CGI movies, airbrushed photographs and on-screen design it’s significant that the new generation of gatefold sleeves tend to look handmade. It goes beyond an urge by arrogant young bands to announce in these commercially-driven, corporate times that this is personal not the product of a marketing department.

Ultimately, the return of the gatefold sleeves means something because the lyrics and music inside the covers does, too.
The details of sound and word may differ markedly between the likes of The Klaxons and Guillemots, say, but both share a similar mindset to the world today and to the act of creativity. Although lacking the ’prog rock’ era’s love of 18 minute epics, lengthy guitar solos and medieval artwork, today’s gatefold sleeve bands all display an admirable lack of fear of being regarded as ‘pretentious’ rare in the fashion-led world of British ‘indie’ music. They’re not afraid of asking their fans to ponder deep questions. Life is a mystery, a tapestry of related and unrelated events and the album sleeve you’re pouring over (they seem to say) reflects this with its array of visual clues and puns. Though they are story tellers, their’s isn’t any old-fashioned ‘concept album’ concept like the 1970s. There may be a start to the story, usually starting in childhood; many of these lyrics are semi-autobiographical, concerned with families, growing up, growing old. The narrative is rarely straightforward. “It always pays to be brave - from the cradle to the grave” argue The Mystery Jets in the song Purple Prose from an album which portray one adolescent’s journey of discovery from childhood to adulthood. Despite setbacks, by the end of the 12 tracks (although the cover says there’s only ten, what's that all about?), he’s still “making dens”, still clinging to the dreams of youth to that place where imagination can still hold sway.

Dark and light co-exist in close proximity at all points on Arcade Fire's 2004 breakthrough album Funeral. The lyrics by Win Butler, Regina Chassagne and co see them remembering "our bedrooms and our parents’ bedrooms”. They sing of neighbourhoods and deaths and the childhood dreams that those deaths nearly extinguished. The common denominator of all these bands is a sensibility that is both realistic and romantic at the same time. It's one best summed up by Guillemots. “The prophets and their bombs have had another success” lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield point out on Trains To Brazil on Through The Windowpane album, probably after watching another news item about the ‘war on terror.‘
He may worry about “how long it will take them to blow us away” but he won’t let it get him down, he’s just “thankful to be facing the day”. The gorgeous If The World Ends takes this view of things on step further, putting all that faith in the power of love in the ultimate, apocalyptical context. “If the world ends, I hope you’re here with me,” sings the bearded, nouveau beatnik lead singer as if he couldn’t think of anything nicer. The Klaxons, once labelled a ‘New Rave’ band, take the romantic leanings of the gatefold sleeves bands to a new height: outer space and infinity. Supernatural sagas of time-travelling in other galaxies, songs awash in luminous phrases such as “silver waves”, “dance of the cosmos”, “ships of sense”, “travel to infinity”. By the final track on Myths of the Near Future, Four Horsemen of 2012, they still believe love is worth fighting for. But there are no happy endings, none of these new gatefold sleeves bands pretend to have the answer.
Which is why so many of them are attracted to influences outside music.

There can scarcely be a time when so many musicians have been inspired by works of literature, as well as art. The classical style front cover of the eccentric rock band British Sea Power’s debut album from 2003, British Sea Power’s Classic The Decline Of British Sea Power, (a title suggesting both a nostalgia yet to come and a double-edged penchant for self-mockery and self-mythologising), comes with a prominently displayed quote in the style of an epitaph. “We ourselves may be loved for only a brief time... Even so, that will suffice...There is a land for the living and a land for the dead.” It turns out to be a line from The Bridge at San Luis Rey (1927) by American novelist Thornton Wilder and  incidentally, the same quotation used by Prime Minister Tony Blair in a memorial service after 9/11.

Arcade Fire’s 2007 album Neon Bible looks to a novel by author John Kennedy Toole about a young man growing up in rural Louisiana during the late 1930s (written when he was 16 but published posthumously in 1989). The literary theme has been a long-time favourite of Glasgow-based Belle & Sebastian who continue to print their song lyrics in the style of a novel.

That same city’s most famous indie label Chemikal Underground, specialise in a similar stylistic approach (the prime example being Arab Strap’s Philophobia from 1998). Such is Chemikal Underground’s literary leanings it went the whole hog in 2007 with the release of Ballads of the Book. An elaborate collaboration between Scottish fiction writers and Scottish musicians, it threw up the unusual pairings of Ian Rankin, A.L Kennedy and Alasdair Gray with the likes of Idlewild, Vashti Bunyan and The Delgados. If The Klaxons’ sense of story-telling seems particularly acute it’s because they’re inspired by three of the most important avant-garde novelists of the second half of the last century. The band take their debut album’s very title from Myths of the Near Future, a short story by a collection published in 1982 by JG Ballard. Track two, Atlantis to Interzone, quotes from various short stories and novels about a metaphorical stateless city by William S Burroughs from the late 1950s/early 1960. Track seven Gravity’s Rainbow borrows from a sprawling, surrealistic tale of the V2 rockets in WW2 by Thomas Pynchon which originally saw the light of day in 1973. Although The Klaxons seem happy to utilise those writers’ apocalyptical settings and sci-fi notions of life going beyond man’s control, it's significant they take show less interest in these maverick authors’ unconventional views of political and sexual relations. As for the prose poetry of Burroughs' cut-up techniques, well...

It’s not just the sleeves or the lyrics where these bands share a similar approach. The bands do more than brandish literary concepts as a button badge on a fan’s jacket. Few of the tracks mentioned so far sound the same at first listen. But there is a common denominator, it's the desire to in keep the listener off balance as much musically as lyrically. Sudden gear changes in song structures and violent clashes of instrumentation - the swoop and the swoon and the rough edges. For bands like Arcade Fire, who list 15 different musicians on the recording of Funeral, where songs ebb and flow, building to a climax that no matter how great somehow fails to bring relief, the electric guitar is not the most important instrument, whichever instrument adds to the mood is the one they use. Such is the power of their sound it makes positive the most gloomy of their lyrics. On Making Dens album, every track maybe short and sharp but The Mystery Jets infuse their galloping indie pop with strains of folk music, sub-African rhythmic patterns and unusual constructions.
The guitars, though clearly 'indie' in style are just one element in a tapestry of strings, piano and call and response harmonies reminiscent of a modern stage musical. The Klaxons’ sharp, frenetic sound mixes the aggression of indie-punk, the high energy percussion of Rave era dance, the basslines of glossy 80s pop and the weird Yamaha keyboard noises of electronica. Not to forget shrill, high-pitched vocals which sounds like a choir of children in a Broadway musical. It's a thrillingly upbeat album with the band crossing genres without a moment’s thought. But how to explain the rabbit punch at the end, the ‘hidden track’ buried deep at the end of the CD, not a dance remix or promising demo, but a full-blown, avant garde melange of feedback and weird noises?

Guillemots’ songs are forever switching pace and style or stopping and starting, dribbling out and restarting in a new style. On Sao Paolo, a mad song for a mad world, it takes them fully eleven minutes 33 seconds of epic build-up and crescendos to make their point which is they’re under no illusions as to the nature of the times they live in and the “horse race” their forced to enter or the “pointless wars” they’re forced to watch helplessly from a distance. The track is bold and ambitious, possibly ‘pretentious’ (there’s that word again) but, crucially, it’s still pop. Like most of the new gatefold sleeve generation, they want to have an impact; there’s a certain bigness of sound, and a desire to communicate with a wide audience. They’re certainly clever but not for cleverness sake. Like art and literature, they’re using their music and lyrics and album covers to try to describe life in the round with honesty but also with hope. Neither hedonists not preachers, they neither shun glamour nor are addicted to it, either. They take things seriously but not too seriously; they’re neither po-faced nor frivolous. Unlike large swathes of ‘indie’ or rock music in the Noughties, they don’t appear to be alienated from the times they live in. The blinkers are off but that’s no excuse for despair Guillemots, amongst, others seem to say.

The new gatefold sleeve bands don’t think or act like any other bands in recent history. As such they blatantly contradict the pessimistic description by writer Simon Reynolds in his otherwise brilliant book Rip It Up and Start Again of a music scene still in the grip of the Nineties' sense of irony and disengagement. Refreshingly free of any sense of duty to stick to a single genre, they fly in the face of a music industry dedicated to 'target audiences' and 'market sectors'. When the swing band brass section arrives from nowhere to hijack the final moments of The Guillemots’ Trains to Brazil in a glorious musical non sequitur, it’s as if the band were saying “no, something good can emerge from any situation, we can still transcend our time and place.” The first bands since the 1980s who think pop can be art and art can be pop, what the return of the gatefold sleeve signifies is a new sort of music, a new kind of romance.


Graham Chalmers

© Modern Music Review (2008)